The film “leaves one confused because it is a confused product of a confused brain”, the reviewer complains. Also, “It is a picture which lacks coherence, a clear and cognizable theme and, consequently, any emotional appeal whatsoever.” Finally, the movie is “pretentious in tone and dull and confusing in effect”.
Many films have been misunderstood in their times, only to be given their due belatedly. And yet, the Filmindia magazine’s overwhelmingly negative review of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa is confounding, especially since Pyaasa, despite – or more likely because of – its melancholic poet-hero and themes of rejection and disillusionment resonated strongly with audiences when it was released in 1957.
Pyaasa is now regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made. The celebration of Guru Dutt’s centenary – he was born on July 9, 1925 – will refocus attention on the eight features he directed. Pyaasa, starring Guru Dutt as the poet Vijay, who is cheated out of fame and accepted only by the sex worker played by Waheeda Rehman, will likely be recognised once again for the masterpiece that it is.
Guru Dutt’s penultimate movie is a staggering feat on all levels – the performances, SD Burman’s music, Sahir Ludhianvi’s lyrics, cinematographer VK Murthy’s beautiful compositions. Guru Dutt’s command over his craft, his sensitivity for the aesthetics of cinema, have never been better.
However, none of this was evident to the Filmindia reviewer, the magazine’s editor Baburao Patel. A critic who revelled in eviscerating films and their makers, Patel had a special distaste for Guru Dutt.
Patel attacked the films that Guru Dutt directed as well as produced, such as Raj Khosla’s C.I.D. (1956). C.I.D. was “thin as air and unconvincing as a Russian prisoner’s confession”. Patel, who liked to twist the knife in deep, added that the stylish Indian noir film was “a cheaply and stupidly conceived, unpalatable crime picture”.
Patel similarly dismissed Guru Dutt’s Mr. and Mrs. 55 (1955) as an example of the filmmaker’s “usual glamorized jugglery”.
Mr. and Mrs. 55, starring Guru Dutt and Madhubala, is a breezily charming, if dated, film about an impecunious cartoonist who marries a clueless heiress. The movie is in the vein of Hollywood’s screwball comedies, with zingy repartee and beautifully filmed tunes that underscore Guru Dutt’s talent for making song interludes part of the larger story.
For Patel, the film was “an odd mixture of some silly satire, mild comedy, ludicrous characterizations, popularly tuned songs, and the usual laboriously dandified song takings which seem to have become Guru Dutt’s stock-in-trade”. Not for the first time in his reviewing career, Patel confused artistry for phoniness and cinematic bravura for flashiness.
Baburao Patel founded Filmindia in 1935 and quickly established himself as an enfant terrible. Patel used his authority to not only provide contrarian views of the Hindi and other language industries but also fulminate on politics, the economy and perceived social ills.
For several decades of its existence until it shut down in 1985, Filmindia was one of the most powerful purveyors of the Hindi and other language industries, Sidharth Bhatia writes in The Patels of Filmindia – Pioneers of Film Journalism (Indus Source Books). Patel ran the magazine with his third wife, the actor and singer Sushila Rani Patel.
“Baburao was an extraordinary editor – he practically wrote the entire magazine himself until Sushila Rani came and shared some of the burden with him,” Bhatia writes. Patel’s stentorian and carping voice was on every page, whether in the industry news tidbits, the gossip columns, the opinion section written under the pseudonym Judas, or the reviews.
‘Kaagaz Ke Phool Inflicts Severe Boredom’ was a considerably less nasty headline than the one for another film released in 1959, Dil Deke Dekho (“Rape of Indian Culture”) or the description of Marine Drive from 1955 as “a disgrace to our country”.
Ironically, one of Guru Dutt’s oft-repeated remarks was “don’t bore me.”
Patel trashed Kaagaz Ke Phool, about the vagaries of show business, as “an ineffective glycerine tear shed over the transience of a showman’s glory”. Guru Dutt too acknowledged the movie’s drawbacks, telling Filmfare that it was “too slow and went over the heads of audiences”.
After the Kaagaz Ke Phool debacle, Guru Dutt did not direct a film again, instead getting heavily involved with his productions. Baburao Patel seemed to approve of this decision, lavishing praise on M Sadiq’s Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1960) and Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962).
Patel described Chaudhvin Ka Chand as “feelingly written and lovingly mounted”, as well as “the scintillating result of a good story and skilful presentation” that was “likely to be long remembered by picturegoers”.
These words apply more accurately to Pyaasa.
The source of Baburao Patel’s grudge against Guru Dutt is unclear. Sushila Rani Patel shed some light on the matter when she spoke to filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur for a biopic he was planning on Guru Dutt in 2008. Dungarpur conducted scores of interviews with Guru Dutt’s collaborators, including Abrar Alvi and VK Murthy, and people who knew the director and his wife, Geeta Dutt.
Sushila Rani Patel told Dungarpur and his research team that Guru Dutt knew her sister Sumati in the 1940s, when they were both at the dancer Uday Shankar’s cultural school in Almora. Patel also revealed that she was related to Guru Dutt’s sister, the painter Lalita Lajmi – Lajmi’s husband Gopi Lajmi was Patel’s nephew.
“My husband was very fond of pictures with a classic touch,” Patel told Dungarpur. “He didn’t like the masala films.” She did not share her husband’s view of Pyaasa, saying that the film “had something” and deserved its reputation as a classic.
Baburao Patel was not swayed by the reputation of a star director or actor, Sushila Rani Patel said in the interview. Her spouse “wrote fearlessly”, she said, adding. “Whatever he felt, he wrote.”
Dungarpur has a theory that the character played by Mala Sinha in Pyaasa is inspired by Sushila Rani Patel. In the film, Guru Dutt’s struggling poet Vijay and Sinha’s Meena are lovers. Meena later marries the odious publisher Ghosh (Rehman), who sets out to destroy Vijay.
Guru Dutt directed his first feature, the crime drama Baazi, in 1951, when he was 26 years old. In his lifetime, he was a successful filmmaker by the Hindi film industry’s standards – his movies had popular actors, most of them made good money, the songs were hits.
Yet, the reverence that is now accorded to Guru Dutt, the awe with which his innate understanding of cinema is studied, the regard for how he filmed songs – all these only followed his death most likely by suicide on October 10, 1964.
He had previously attempted suicide at least twice. His passing at the age of 39 was blamed on a lethal combination of professional setbacks, personal turmoil and possibly undiagnosed depression.
In her definitive study Guru Dutt – A Life in Cinema (Oxford University Press), Nasreen Munni Kabir writes: “The cruel irony of belated recognition has visited itself upon many artists, and if we think of the posthumous recognition of the poet Vijay of Pyaasa, it could be said that Guru Dutt had a premonition of being among such artists; indeed, his contribution to Indian cinema has only been fully recognized some years after his death in 1964.”
A deeply complex man by all accounts, of an intense and brooding personality but also generous and affectionate, Guru Dutt was an enigma while alive. After his death, he entered the annals of geniuses who leave too early.
Kabir, who also directed the documentary In Search of Guru Dutt (1989), writes in her book on the filmmaker, “Guru Dutt could not have predicted the impact that he would have in time; not only in India but in many parts of Europe. Death has indeed brought the kind of erasure that echoes his own feelings suggested in Pyaasa – that a dead artist is more greatly valued.”
The cover of the Filmfare issue dedicated to Guru Dutt after his passing doesn’t even mention his name. The cover has a black-and-white photo of Guru Dutt’s half-shaded, pensive face looking into the camera. The text, inspired by Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, reads “Khuda, Maut Aur Ghulam.” God, death and the slave.
“The interviews [for the proposed biopic] revealed that people thought of Guru Dutt very highly when he was alive, but they also recognised his self-destructive streak,” Shivendra Singh Dungarpur told Scroll. “His peers – Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, K Asif – had great regard for his work. Guru Dutt was the only outside director who was permitted to shoot Kaagaz Ke Phool at Mehboob’s studio.”
Although Guru Dutt was frequently described as aloof and focused on his work, he appears to have taken his revenge on Baburao Patel in Kaagaz Ke Phool.
Guru Dutt’s most autobiographical film is about the tragedy of Suresh Sinha, a successful director undone by self-doubt, a bad marriage, and an extra-marital affair with his new discovery, Shanti (Waheeda Rehman). Suresh’s wealthy in-laws look down on his profession and scheme to keep their daughter Veena away from him.
Suresh’s marital family comprises a bunch of grotesque characters. In one scene, Veena’s parents, played by Mahesh Kaul and Pratima Devi, are in their living room surrounded by dogs – a staging that is almost identical to a photograph of the Patel couple that hung in their house in Mumbai, Dungarpur pointed out.
“Guru Dutt was obsessed with the artist Vincent Van Gogh, but he was pre-occupied with himself too,” Dungarpur said. “I don’t think the scene in Kaagaz Ke Phool was an act of revenge as such. Guru Dutt was always taking ideas from real life and giving them an autobiographical touch.”
In an essay Classics and Cash, which is reproduced in Kabir’s book, Guru Dutt writes about the eternal battle between creativity and commerce.
“Since centuries, the creators of classics have had to pay the price for rising above the rut of prevailing mediocrity and for their daring isolation from the hoi polloi,” Guru Dutt observes. A filmmaker who dares to experiment has to be prepared for an unpredictable outcome, which “gives edge to the thrill of movie-making”, he adds.
Although Guru Dutt lost the battle in 1964, he won the war, evident in the continuing interest in and interpretations of his exquisite and haunting films.
Also read:
[Photos] Rare glimpses of Guru Dutt’s last unfinished movie ‘Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi’
How Guru Dutt laid himself bare in his films
Even before ‘Pyaasa’, the shadows had started gathering in Guru Dutt’s ‘Mr & Mrs 55’
